Daily Archives: April 18, 2011

The 2012 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship Regional Rounds are coming to Atlanta, GA March 23 & 25, 2012 hosted by Georgia Tech University and held at the Georgia Dome! You have the opportunity to purchase tickets before they go on sale to the general public. [Emphasis added.]

I’d like to think that was done on purpose. It’s the romantic in me.

You’d better look quickly. I’m guessing that won’t be up for very long.

If you’re looking for a summary of Boise State’s spring game, there’s a good one at OBNUG.

Don’t you just hate when this happens?

… The Broncos don’t typically show much in the way of new strategies and formations at their scrimmages, but they did have some interesting wrinkles in tonight’s game. Most we’ve seen before, but it’s good to know they’re still part of the gameplan. Here are the strategies I noticed:

The pistol formation.

The 3-3-5 defense with Shea McClellin as a stand-up linebacker next to Tyrone Crawford. When McClellin blitzed, that made for a DE-DE-DT-DT alignment up front, which would be an interesting twist.

Hurry-up offense.

Blitzing nickelbacks. The Bronco defense blitzed a lot tonight, and I’d say that at least half the time the blitz came from the nickel.

Read option. The backup quarterbacks ran this fairly often.

Traditional option. Again, these plays were reserved for Southwick and Hedrick.

Billy Winn at defensive end. This may have just been Winn goofing around, but he was a terror at DE.

“Tackle Over” formation. In other words, three offensive lineman on one side of the center, one lineman on the other side.

1-5-5 defense. The Broncos had one defensive lineman in a three-point stance and the rest of the front six/seven buzzing around the line of scrimmage.

I was thinking much the same thing as I watched Carlton Thomas bounce off two of his interior linemen last Saturday.

With the end of spring football, we hit the dreaded time for the college football blogger, the real offseason. No National Signing Day to agonize over. No coaching changes to analyze. No practice reports to speculate about. What we’ve got to look forward to until August are posts about past times, statistics (guilty!), occasional coach sightings and the usual pastiche of scooter and drinking incidents in Athens.

No wonder the conference realignment story took off like wildfire last year.

I’m hoping there’s gonna be something better than that to consider this go ’round, but my fear is that the NCAA is going to be the story of the summer, both about who and what are being investigated/sanctioned and in terms of how ineptly the NCAA goes about its business. That’s almost too depressing to contemplate, as much as some of you would like to see certain punishments administered.

So I thought I’d ask – what, if anything, would you like to see taken up at GTP over the next few months? Give me some food for thought and I’ll chew on it.

Much of what’s there is more a confirmation of what we knew – the West was the better division, by far; Mississippi State was the conference overachiever; Vanderbilt’s season defined “epic suck” – but there’s one interesting thing I found that surprised me. Auburn won a national title without being dominant statistically in the conference. To get an idea of what I mean by that, check out Matt’s results from the prior season.

Auburn’s 2010 SDPI would have only been fourth-best in 2009, and it would have been considerably behind the top two teams.

Again, there are two teams which put together far superior SDPI numbers to Auburn’s 2010 result.

The difference is with the defense. In the two seasons before 2010, the top teams (Florida and Alabama, in both cases) sported defensive rankings which were no lower than third in the conference. Auburn’s 2010 defensive SDPI ranked seventh in the SEC.

Don’t get me wrong, Auburn’s number is certainly above average. It’s not like the Tigers were awful, of course. But you’d expect a team that went undefeated through the nation’s toughest football conference regular season, won the SECCG and capped the season by winning the BCS title game to have stood out a little more strongly. As it turned out, Auburn didn’t even have the best SDPI in the conference.

Quote Of The Day

“It brings back a great Bulldog running back in Thomas who has NFL playing experience and has had success as a college coach at multiple schools. He also inherits a position that has been built to an elite level by Bryan. And it gives Bryan the opportunity to return to coaching the position he played and the one where he cut his teeth serving as a graduate assistant under wide receiver coach John Eason here at UGA. It also provides him with a new experience as a passing game coordinator.” -- Mark Richt, AB-H, 2/16/15